In large scale manufacturing and assembly plants, such as those used in automobile manufacturing, hundreds of machines and their machine operators may work simultaneously. In a large production environment, the production line may include miles of conveyors. The plant itself may be millions of square feet. An increase in the precision of production timing and/or control may provide better resource allocation. Accordingly, process and controls that keep the line moving may increase production and reduce expenses.
In a single work shift, a machine, for example, at an automotive plant may process up to hundreds even thousands of products. The conveyor belt may move at several feet per second. The line moves fast and operations are complex. In large assembly or manufacturing plants, thousands of machines may be grouped into hundreds of stations. Many plants are substantially automated, where one manufacturing staff person may operate several machines. Additionally, a large plant may have many maintenance staff per shift.
For many different reasons, a machine may malfunction and generate a fault or an event code. There may be many thousands of event codes associated with a specific machine. An event or fault code is an industry term to indicate a change of state of a machine or its inputs or outputs. It also may provide a symptom or even the cause of a problem with a machine. Much like in a modern automobile, sensors are disposed in a machine to detect, for example, when out of the ordinary situations occur. In the case of an automobile, for example, if a door is left ajar, an event code will be generated to alert the occupant that a door is ajar. Event codes, when generated, may be electronically sent to a central location when a machine stops operating.
In a large plant, when one machine fails, its entire station or zone may stop operating, and thus the impact of the failure may be high. As a result, parts to be processed by the machine or station may accumulate, with machines feeding the halted machine becoming blocked because the upstream buffer has filled. Moreover, parts discharged for further processing by a downstream machine may drain from the downstream buffer, with machines drawing from it becoming starved. The impact of a downed machine or station can quickly spread to other machines and stations of the production line.
The maintenance staff is best utilized carrying out its primary task of maintaining the machines with preventative maintenance. Maintenance staff's primary task also includes repairing significant equipment failures. While routine maintenance may be planned, faults are not predicted. Thus, maintenance and repair resources may at times be overwhelmed in the number of event codes received from the line. In this way, maintenance and repair resource allocation is often times provided on in an ad hoc manner.
Various applications to process data are used in the manufacturing process. They include those to monitor event codes as they occur. More comprehensive analysis is possible however, it is extremely time consuming and often impractical due to the volume of the data that is required to be processed.
The processing, however, may not include processing real-time data with historical data to get up to the minute predictions on future event code generation. In this way, current conditions may not be correlated with historical conditions to provide up-to-date predictions.